The closing Executive Panel
discussion at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium on January 15 provoked
diverse views on the drivers and future of innovation in the microelectronics
manufacturing supply chain. While
technology demand and manufacturing efficiency provide the motivation for
continued innovation in the minds of some, others believe the supply chain is
forfeiting its value proposition and places too much emphasis on cost
reduction.

In a
wide-ranging discussion moderated by VLSI Research chairman Dan Hutcheson, the arguments
and examples of these perspectives spanned the topics of new device
architectures, lithography, and the 450mm wafer transition.

John Chen, Ph.D.,
vice president of technology and foundry operations at
Nvidia Corporation, said that affordability is key due
to price sensitivities in the consumer market place. People want electronic gadgets with great
features and a good interface between them; however, the vast majority of users
are young individual users and price is very important.

Chen said that if the industry
truly collaborates together early-on, it can have early engagement in
concurrent engineering and eliminate waste and redundancy. This reduces total
cost and increases profitability for all.

Chen said that he doesn’t believe
in “squeezing the vendors”; however, there is still waste in the supply
loop. Chen prefers think in terms of a
supply “loop,” in which the participants have to work together rather than a
supply “chain,” which connotes a more one dimensional linear relationship.

Chen said, “It’s difficult to
“out-smart” others in the supply loop because all the participants have great
capabilities and the only solution is to increase the pie and share the
rewards.”

He asserts that this kind of
coordination is essential given greater complexity from challenging technology
requirements and an increasing rate of change. As an example, he speculated
that the industry faces three significant discontinuities as it adopts
manufacturing technology for 20nm semiconductor devices.

First, is a good discontinuity —
the introduction of 3D transistors or finfets. These new device structures reduce
power requirements and greatly enable consumer products with longer battery
life by providing better control of the gate and reducing leakage current. Chen
said that without these kinds of design innovations and the accompanying
manufacturing process technology, we cannot have a quantum jump in performance.

The second discontinuity
accompanies the end of 193 lithography — the point at which multiple patterning
is required. At 20nm, the number of masking steps has increased 15-20 percent. Chen
characterizes multiple patterning, “as a brute dumb force.” It causes wafer
costs to increase and yields to suffer. Both of these results contribute to a
negative discontinuity in die cost.

The third discontinuity is the
wafer size. Chen argues that we are already in need of 450mm wafers. He noted that every time the industry has
migrated to a larger size wafer, additional innovation comes with the
transition. Accordingly, he expects additional innovation to accompany 450mm technology
development.

Mike
Splinter, executive chairman of Applied Materials, offered an optimistic
perspective on the semiconductor demand to be created by “the internet of
things” and pervasive computing — labels for the massively interconnected
sensing and computing capabilities, which he expects to help address complex business,
healthcare and education issues that face society.

The
sub-trends influencing pervasive computing are mobility and analysis of huge
amounts of information from personal devices that will be available anywhere
and anytime producing a gigantic amount of data. Because of this rapid expansion, he believes
that we are underestimating the need for bandwidth and memory. He contrasted
the adoption rate of other products as a way to make the point that we face
unprecedented demand acceleration. He
said that television took 40 years to acquire 50 million users; Facebook took a
couple years; and now an app can have 50 million users in a few weeks. Because of this data centers will grow at an
increasing rate and we will need greater performance. Outside the data center we need lower power
and cost reductions.

The highest value technologies
will increase performance, reduce power, and lower cost; and that is how he
believes the industry should measure what we do and prioritize R&D
resources.

Splinter was confident that the
industry would continue to drive smaller dimensions down to 5nm. Splinter said
the lithography is now essentially a “cost play.” Scaling is no longer the enabling
play, it’s a cost play because there are alternatives such as precision
material engineering.

Splinter said, “We haven’t seen
this kind of demand for innovation since the 1970’s when the industry saw the
emergence of non-volatile memory, DRAM and the shift away from aluminum and to
silicon for logic gates. That’s the
environment we are in today. There have
been tremendous advancements in flash memory, but we need a new DRAM as well as
3D technology in logic devices.”

Equipment companies have become
very efficient through productivity improvements, engineering, consolidation
and offshoring. He believes the industry
is reaching the limits of how much more efficiency can be attained without
significant R&D trade-offs. Investments in innovation should be evaluated
on the criteria of power, performance and cost.

Regarding 450mm, Splinter said
that the technology changes under consideration for the large wafer size can
much more easily be achieved at 300mm if the industry concentrates its R&D
dollars there. Furthermore, he is
concerned about the posture of memory makers because most of the wafers
processed are for memory products and if memory makers don’t participate in
450mm we won’t see the volumes necessary to support the larger wafer area.

“Where there is a demand for
innovation, innovation will happen. I am
excited about next 10-15 years. The only limitation we may have is assuring
that we have the young people coming into the industry.”

In response to a question by
panel moderator Dan Hutcheson, Mike Splinter rebutted an assertion earlier in
the conference that consolidation and large mergers were creating
mega-suppliers that are too big to fail, but also too big to innovate. Splinter
expressed enormous optimism about the prospects of sparking innovation when the
engineers from TEL and Applied Materials are allowed to get together and share
diverse but complimentary capabilities.
He pointed to beneficial collaboration that occurred when Applied
Materials acquired Varian and believes that, when combined with TEL, the new
organization will be able to leverage real collaboration and focus more R&D
dollars on innovative technology.

According to Kazuo Ushida,
executive vice president and president of Precision Equipment Company for
Nikon, lithography has long supported Moore’s Law in lowering the cost per
transistor. However, it is reaching the limits of what can be achieved with
wavelength reduction and numerical aperture enlargement. EUVL has numerous and costly challenges, and
therefore Nikon believes that it is necessary to migrate to a larger wafer
size. During the transition from
200-300mm, there was a quadrupling in in the optical lithographic performance
improvement.

Ushida said that Nikon is willing
to take a long view on the return on investment to support customers. He compared the situation to Boeing’s
investment in developing the 787 which will have approximately 20 year payback.

He said that throughput of 150
wafers per hour will be needed to be competitive with 300mm and that industry
synchronization is essential to lower the time to recouping the cost of
development.

Terry Brewer, Ph.D., president
and founder of Brewer Science, bemoaned the persistent emphasis on cost
reduction that is pervasive in industry dialog.
He fears the industry is drifting away from true innovation as a driver
of technology. Picking up on an earlier topic about the industry’s need to
recruit future talent, Brewer said that it will be hard for young
technologists to be excited about manufacturing innovation because there is too
much focus on cost.

Brewer cautioned that the
manufacturing supply chain will decline in value if it positions costs reduction
as the primary benefit of innovation. Brewer said, “At one time, Moore’s law
was very valuable because chips were the main value proposition in
electronics. Sadly, it is not today.” He suggested that semiconductor manufacturing
is being supplanted as the “mainstream” value creator by companies like Apple
and Google.

Brewer contrasted the industry
mindset to that of Apple’s saying that, “Steve Jobs came out with an $800 phone
when everyone else was trying to reduce cost.
Apple won because it had a better value proposition.”

Brewer suggested that the
industry roadmap for the 450mm transition, EUV lithography will slow or be
pushed out because of costs. In
contrast, the last two nodes were driven primarily out of chemical engineering
and materials innovations.

The panel concluded with a
consensus that innovation and collaboration are tightly related activities and
that value-driven innovation is required to sustain the industry in a
consolidating supply chain environment.